Parents to share child custody in Switzerland

Another country looks at the best interest of children and determines having contact with both parents on a relatively equal basis, just like in marriage, is appropriate.  Take not Canadian politicians and judges.MJM

The Local

Parents to share child custody in Switzerland

Published: 18 Nov 2011 11:38 GMT+1
Updated: 18 Nov 2011 11:24 GMT+1
Online: http://www.thelocal.ch/1802/20111118/

The Swiss government has decided separated parents should automatically have joint custody of their children except in cases involving the specific protection of the child.

When a couple splits or gets divorced, custody of their children will be shared without the need for a prior agreement or the approval of a judge.

Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said on Thursday that the Federal Council considered the move obvious, since a child has the right to build an autonomous relationship wityh both father and mother.

All political parties, as well as fathers’ and men’s associations, welcomed Sommaruga’s proposal, which is widely expected top pass into law when voted on in parliament in the coming weeks.

But while joint custody is set to become the norm, a judge will still have to sign off on the suitability of both parents to take responsibility for their children. A parent may be denied custody for reasons including infirmity, a history of violence or absence.

Currently, when a couple divorces, one parent generally gets sole custody. If the couple is not married, the mother is the legal custodian. For now, joint custody is only possible if both parties sign an agreement on how they plan to distribute and share alimony and childcare.

The draft proposal also regulates the question of residency. If a parent wishes to move, either alone or with the child, he or she will need the consent of the other party. If there is no agreement, a judge will have to intervene to protect the well-being of the child.

Every year, about 14,000 children in Swizerland are confronted with their parents’ divorce or separation.

Meritxell Mir (news@thelocal.ch)

Interview: Oliver Canic, Croatian Association for Equal Parenting president (SETimes.com)

This is eerily similar to most western democracies.

By Natasa Radic for Southeast European Times in Zagreb -- 27/10/11

Oliver Canic initiated and founded Croatia's first Equal Parenting Association. [Petar Kos/SETimes]

 Two years ago, Oliver Canic founded the Association for Equal Parenting in Croatia. The group volunteers are mostly fathers trying to take a more active role in their child's upbringing after a divorce or separation.

The association is engaged in answering questions in the post-divorce and parenting equality issues, mostly from fathers, and some mothers. Canic talked to SETimes correspondent Natasa Radic about the need for equal parenting and its improvements in Croatia.

SETimes: What were the main reasons for initiating this project?

Oliver Canic: Every day I meet people who say they are being prevented from participating in their children's lives. The system in Croatia has been supporting a model where mothers usually gain full support of the system to push fathers away from children's lives after a divorce or break up between parents.

Fathers sometimes accept such status quo, but not frequently. We do not support either side. We think equal involvement of both parents in the lives of children after a breakup is necessary, where the children are granted their rights.

More:  Interview: Oliver Canic, Croatian Association for Equal Parenting president (SETimes.com)

2011 TV Season sees sexist role reversal with Chauviinst Women and Manginas.

Fall TV’s mean women, milquetoast men

Post-feminist shows flip gender stereotypes

Hampton Stevens -  The Washington Times - Wednesday, September 21, 2011

If the fall TV season is any guide, the sexual revolution that was supposed to liberate men and women from traditional sex roles seems to have resulted instead in a straight-up role reversal. The male characters are messes - insecure, jobless, barely able to dress themselves without a wife or girlfriend and/or living in mom’s proverbial basement. Their female counterparts, meanwhile, are flaunting the same selfish, boorish ways that once got men called “chauvinist pigs.” The only difference today is that when these female characters act like jerks, we are expected to cheer them on as “empowered.”

Mindful of changing social mores, let’s take the men first.

As many critics have noted, 2011 is the season of emasculation with a bevy of new shows about the purportedly dire state of American manhood. For example, “Man Up” (which premiered Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. on ABC) features a Judd Apatow-ish bunch of latte-sipping best friends in their 40s who go on a quest for their inner “Iron Johns.”

...more here   http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/21/mean-women-milquetoast-men/

Sarnia Group Seeks Family Law Reform

Below we have another group seeking Family Law reform starting in Sarnia. I wish them well.  Hopefully they will align themselves with the Canadian Equal Parenting Council, a National umbrella group lobbying for shared/equal parenting change.

Vested interests in the Department of Justice and Attorney General`s departments within Provinces are resisting reform for shared/equal parenting and the following post I placed in the Ottawa Citizen today helps explain why.

MikeMurphy

1:04 PM on August 30, 2011

The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) is the main lobby group of Lawyers in Canada, yet they are not registered as lobbyists. They can have the Canadian Head of State as their main speaker, a member of the same lobby group, without any one giving it a second thought.


Last year in Ireland they had the Justice Minister do a speech where he was directly lobbied to not act on PMB-C-422 for shared/equal parenting. This same Minister acquiesced to this blatant attempt at lobbying by stating the government did not support it.

A definition of corruption is abuse of the system. We have a lobby group, the CBA, acting as a vested interest in protecting family law lawyers from the potential of lost business due to the enactment of legislation that would reduce their need, especially in court litigation.

I do not think the CBA is capable of reform without independent oversight. It will not come from the Legislative branch until we see fewer lawyers operating in that sphere as lawmakers.  Only in the area of the law can we see such direct conflicts of interest, very similarly to the Canadian Head of states recent speech.

At least he told his colleagues they need to fix their very leaky roof.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sets+tone/5320818/story.html#Comments#ixzz1WX7lfEWn

 

 

The Sarnia Observer

Fix sought for family law

By SHAWN JEFFORDS, The Observer

Updated 1 day ago

Ontario's family law system is broken and a new group formed in Sarnia is lobbying the government for a permanent fix.

Canadians For Family Law Reform was founded in April by eight city residents who have been through the family law system. Two of the co-founders, Anna Moscardelli and Jim Canie, said the current structure turns spouse against spouse, often bankrupting both, as they fight over child custody and assets.

"The court system has developed these animosities between ex-spouses," Moscardelli said.


The group, which supports men and women, wants to see the government overhaul the family law system. A focus on mediated solutions, not long, drawn out court battles would be a good place to start, Moscardelli said.

"For me, it took seven years, 364 days from the time the original motion was filed until the final order came down," she said.

Moscardelli said she knows of a local couple who were married for four years and divorced, only to fight it out in the courts for 11 years before reaching a resolution.

Moscardelli's own lengthy court battle destroyed what was left of her relationship with her ex-husband and hurt their children.

"It's really the kids who lose out in all of this," she said.

The group would also like to see greater accountability measures placed on family law lawyers, some of whom draw out cases to make more money, she said.

"(Some lawyers) look at it like, they don't make money resolving cases," she said. "It's a huge moneymaking system."

Canie said the system also creates undue stress for families. His court proceedings have affected his health. He now regularly takes blood pressure medication and sleeping pills so he can rest at night.

"The stress is unbearable," he said.

Canie said people who can't afford lawyers find themselves lost in a pile of complicated paperwork.

Even those who can afford a lawyer sometimes can't find one to take on their case, he said.

"Individuals just don't know what to do," he said. "They don't know where to start."

The group will host a public meeting Sept. 8 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., at the Sarnia Library downtown.

They're encouraging people to come out and share their stories. The group has already sent letters to Attorney General Chris Bentley, Ombudsman Andre Marin and Law Society of Upper Canada asking each to take action.

"We need some change because the current system just isn't cutting it," Moscardelli said.

For more information log on to canadiansforfamilylawreform.com. The group is also on Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.theobserver.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3276561#.TltZwcl8e6M.blogger

The cause of UK Riots

Melanie Phillips, as she often does, gets right to the heart of the underlying root cause of the London Riots.  She says it far better than I have and its simple. Parents are at fault and more particularly single parent female families are ill equipped to handle teen boys.  Shared equal parenting and stopping the incentive's to  single female births will be a good start.  What if we required these single mom parents to take out an insurance policy to pay for the future damage their children will cause?MJM

 

 Goodbye to the Enlightenment

Published in: Melanie's Blog

An illuminating report on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0810) this morning said it all about the British riots. Some teenage thugs who were hooding up to go looting were asked why they were doing it. Maybe they couldn’t afford the trainers and other goods they were setting out to steal? Yeah, we can afford them, came the reply; but since the goods were there to be robbed, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. What about their parents? Did they know where they were? Yeah, came the reply, but the most they do is shout at me. And as for the police, well the worse that can happen is that I’ll get as ASBO (antisocial behaviour order).

Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine. I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why can’t people see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.

The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing, stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.


The rest here.

London Riots: The root cause: Social Engineering to give mom sole physical custody

Many of us have been saying the two parent family as the bedrock of modern civilization is essential,  and the Judiciry giving sole physical custody to moms, in Canada over 90% of the time, is resulting in generatuions of children lacking a moral compass, often inspired by a dad.  The recent London riots have given rise to the proof of these assertions.  Given we are unlikely to impact the divorce rate without governments encouraging families to stay together, getting equal/shared parenting is essential in order to keep fathers and infrequently moms in the lives of their children after divorce.

It's ironic the Judges involved in the prosecution of the looters are asking where the parents are.  Some of these same judges may have been responsible for separating the children from their fathers and not enforcing access when he tried to see them.MJM

Now we have proof that abolishing parental rights and encouraging single-parent families was disastrous: the disaster has happened

What was done by design can be undone the same way. But will there be enough political determination to do it?

By William Oddie on Monday, 15 August 2011

A 12-year-old boy leaves Manchester magistrates court last week (PA wire)

Last Thursday, in an article snappily entitled “Why didn’t the looters’ parents know where they were? Why didn’t they teach them about right and wrong? Answer: society has undermined the family”, I quoted Fr Finigan saying that “For several decades our country has undermined marriage, the family, and the rights of parents… Now all of a sudden, we want parents to step in and tell their teenage children how to behave”, and Melanie Phillips pointing to “family breakdown and mass fatherlessness” as one of the principal underlying causes of the riots and looting of last week.

I concluded (and I don’t apologise for returning to this theme now: a lot more needs to be said about it, and now is the time to say it) that of all the things the government now needs to do, “it’s the married family which is the institution that needs rebuilding most urgently”.


I am as certain of that as anything I have ever written, and I’ve been saying it for over 20 years: I was saying it, for instance, when I was attacking (in the Mail and also the Telegraph) as it went through the Commons the parliamentary bill which became that disastrous piece of (Tory) legislation called the Children Act 1989, which abolished parental rights (substituting for them the much weaker “parental responsibility”), which encouraged parents not to spend too much time with their children, which even preposterously gave children the right to take legal action against their parents for attempting to discipline them, which made it “unlawful for a parent or carer to smack their child, except where this amounts to ‘reasonable punishment’;” and which specified that “Whether a ‘smack’ amounts to reasonable punishment will depend on the circumstances of each case taking into consideration factors like the age of the child and the nature of the smack.” If the child didn’t think it “reasonable” he could go to the police. It was an Act which, in short, deliberately weakened the authority of parents over their children and made the state a kind of co-parent.


There are, of course, many other causes for the undermining of the married family (which David Cameron says he now wants to rebuild). Divorce, from the 1960s on, became progressively easier and easier to obtain. Another cause has been the insidious notion (greatly encouraged by successive governments but particularly under New Labour – Old Labour tended to be much more traditional in its views on the family) that the family has many forms, that marriage is just one option, and that lone parenting is just as “valid” (dread word) a form as any other. If you thought that voluntary lone parenting should be discouraged, rather than (as it was) positively encouraged by the taxation and benefits system, you were practically written off as a fascist.


Well, all this relativist rubbish has now been comprehensively shown by its consequences to have been dangerous drivel all along; and I am discovering that to be able to say “I told you so” is under the circumstances not at all as enjoyable as I had thought it might be: any satisfaction is of a very grim kind.


But it is now beyond any doubt, and we need to say so now, to nail the lies that have been spouted for the last 40 years once and for all. The conclusive proof of the existence and the effects of the widespread breakdown of parental responsibility (even where there are two parents) and also of the catastrophic consequences of the encouragement of lone parenting was to be found on the front page of the Times on Saturday, in an article to which I can’t give a link since you can’t get it online. I will have to summarise and quote extensively.


The headline was “Judge asks: where are the parents of rioters?” and it opens as follows:

Parents who refuse to take responsibility for children accused of criminal offences were condemned by a judge yesterday who demanded to know why the mother of a 14-year-old girl in the dock over the looting of three shops was not in court.
District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe was incredulous when told that the girl’s parents were too busy to see their daughter appear before City of Westminster magistrates after she was accused of offences during the violent disorder in London this week. She said that many parents “don’t seem to care” that their children were in court facing potentially lengthy custodial sentences.
Her comments echoed those a day earlier by District Judge Jonathan Feinstein when he highlighted the absence of parents at hearings in Manchester. “The parents have to take responsiblity for this child – apart from one case I have not seen any father or mother in court,” he said.

The Times had been conducting an investigation into the cause of the riots, and interviews with young people and community workers on estates across London revealed “deep concerns about the lack of parental authority”. Youth workers said that mothers (presumably in such cases there are no fathers) are “too terrified of their own children to confront them and often turn a blind eye to cash or stolen goods brought home”. Lone parenthood, it emerges, is in fact a primary cause of the August riots (as they are beginning to be called):

An analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that, among other factors linking the 18 areas worst hit by public disorder, is a high rate of single-parent families and broken homes.

And in an interview with the Times today, Shaun Bailey, a youth worker recently appointed as the Government’s “Big Society” czar, argues that childraising has been “nationalised”.

Of the defendants who appeared before magistrates in Westminster yesterday accused of riot crimes across London, half were aged under 18, but few parents attended the hearings, even though their children had been in police custody for up to two days.
One member of the court’s staff said: “I can’t recall seeing any of the parents down here”… A boy of 15 was accused of looting a JD Sports shop in Barking, East London. A 17-year-old student from East London was also accused of receiving £10,000 of mobile phones, cigarettes and clothing looted from Tesco. The items and small quantity of cannabis were discovered in his bedroom at the family home… community workers admitted that broken families often led to children taking to crime.

One youth worker, who has helped children in Lambeth, south London, for 20 years, told the Times that single mothers were often scared of their sons. “They would not challenge them if they came home with stolen goods,” the worker, who did not wish to be named, said.

“In some cases these young men steal more than their mother earns or gets in benefit. They become the father figure, the main earner.” Young men echo the lack of authority. “My mum can’t tell me what to do,” said Lee, 18, from Copley Court, an estate in West Ealing. “It’s the same with young kids. Most of their dads left early on and they don’t listen to anyone.”

There isn’t much more to be said: all one can do is repeat oneself. We now know what rubbish it is to deny that lone parenthood should be avoided wherever possible. As for marriage, study after study has shown that from the point of view of the child it is the best and most stable basis for the family. In the 50s, everyone, including governments of all colours, knew that marriage was the foundation of social stability: and a man whose wife stayed at home to look after the children didn’t pay any tax at all until he was earning the average national wage.

That whole dispensation was blown apart by the accursed supposed “liberation” of the 60s, and by political ideologies of various kinds, not least by radical feminism. There was nothing inevitable about it: it was done by deliberate political design. And what political design can do, political design can undo. It’s more difficult – much more difficult – of course and it can’t be done overnight. David Cameron, to be fair, does seem to see some of this (IDS sees even more).

But does he have the political determination actually to do it? We shall see. I am hopeful; I always am at first. But I greatly fear that as month succeeds month, even my own tendency towards sunny optimism will begin first to flag and then to die. And this time, I don’t want to be able to say “I told you so”.

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